This invention relates generally to the field of children's play structures and more specifically to three dimensional storybook play structure.
It has been a tradition for hundreds of years to tell stories to young children as part of a child's learning process. Originally stories were told orally and passed from one generation to the next. More recently, printed story books have become very popular as a means of telling stories to children. Traditional children's books consist of painted or drawn pictures printed on two dimensional pages and combined with text. Pop-up flaps have been included in some new books to add some three dimensionality to the story telling experience.However, the concept of providing a large scale three dimensional representation for a story has not been developed to date. Others have proposed structures that help a child participate in creative play such as John Ryan's patent U.S. Pat. No. 3,363,360 which discloses a doll house structure that includes additions to the walls that can represent parts of a house such as a kitchen stove. Miriam Kelley, in her patent U.S. Pat. No. 5,733,165 discloses a play structure that includes additional play figures that relate to play surfaces on the interior of the structure. Paula Coleman, in her patent U.S. Pat. No. 5,004,445 discloses a series of shapes of home furniture and kitchen appliances, that when opened, reveal a miniature environment relating to that particular item. For example, the side of a play bed structure can fold out to reveal an entire miniature bedroom. Connie Melashenko, in her patent U.S. Pat. No. 5,352,149 discloses a children's play structure with interchangeable scenes. This patent shows a play structure where graphic elements can be added to the interior walls adapting the space to a classroom, or a kitchen, or the like.However, none of the above described patents, or other patents in this category, describe a novel approach to story telling a portion of a play structure represents a page or pages of a story book, and by crawling or walking from one play structure to the next, a child can travel through a story in a three dimensional manner.